White Like Me Quotes

“The power of resistance is to set an example: not necessarily to change the person with whom you disagree, but to empower the one who is watching and whose growth is not yet completed, whose path is not at all clear, whose direction is still very much up in the proverbial air.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

“And let's just be honest, there is no such place called 'justice,' if by that we envision a finish line, or a point at which the battle is won and the need to continue the struggle over with. After all, even when you succeed in obtaining a measure of justice, you're always forced to mobilize to defend that which you've won. There is no looming vacation. But there is redemption in struggle.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

“So, in "Melting Pot" the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, "America was the new world and Europe was the old," in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

“What whites have rarely had to think about—because being the dominant group, we are so used to having our will done, with a little effort at least—is that maybe the point is not victory, however much we all wish to see justice attained and injustice routed. Maybe our redemption comes from the struggle itself. Maybe it is in the effort, the striving for equality and freedom that we become human.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

“When I got to college, the fake ID thing wasn't that important, since pretty much everyone could get away with drinking in New Orleans. But the drugs, well, that was a different story altogether, because drugs are every bit as illegal in New Orleans as anywhere else--at least, if you're black and poor, and have the misfortune of doing your drugs somewhere other than the dorms at Tulane University. But if you are lucky enough to be living at Tulane, which is a pretty white place, especially contrasted with the city where it's located, which is 65 percent black, then you are absolutely set.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

“Hardly any aspect of my life, from where I had lived to my education to my employment history to my friendships, had been free from the taint of racial inequity, from racism, from whiteness. My racial identity had shaped me from the womb forward. I had not been in control of my own narrative. It wasn’t just race that was a social construct. So was I.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“And in "Elbow Room" the cast sings the glories of westward expansion in the United States, which involved the murder of native peoples and the violent conquest of half of Mexico. Among the lines in the song is one that intones, "There were plenty of fights / To win land right / But the West was meant to be / It was our Manifest Destiny?" Let it suffice to say that happily belting out a tune in which one merrily praises genocide is always easier for those whose ancestors weren't on the receiving end of the deal.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

“When you’re a member of the privileged group, you don’t take kindly to someone telling you that you can’t do something,”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“People never hurt others in moments of personal strength and bravery, when they are feeling good about themselves, when they are strong and confident. If we spent all of our waking moments in that place, then fighting for social justice would be redundant; we would simply have social justice and be done with it, and we could all go swimming, or fishing, or bowling, or dancing, or whatever people do. But it is because we spend so much of our time in that other place, that place of diminished capacity, of flagging energy, or wavering and somewhat flaccid commitment, that we have to be careful.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

“As a white man, born and reared in a society that has always bestowed upon me advantages that it has generally withheld from people of color, I am not expected to think the way I do. I am not supposed to speak against and agitate in opposition to racism and institutionalized white supremacy. Indeed, for people of color, it is often shocking to see white people even thinking about race, let alone challenging racism. After all, we don’t have to spend much time contemplating the subject if we’d rather not, and white folks have made something of a pastime out of ignoring racism, or at least refusing to call it out as a major social problem to be remedied. But for me, ignoring race and racism has never been an option. Even when it would have been easier to turn away, there were too many forces and circumstances pulling me back, compelling me to look at the matter square in the face—in my face.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“The power of resistance is to set an example: not necessarily to change the person with whom you disagree, but to empower the one who is watching and whose growth is not yet complete, whose path is not at all clear, whose direction is still very much in the proverbial air.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

“Even when a white person is closely tied to African Americans, that white person is often living in an entirely different world from that of their friends, though we rarely realize it.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“Even white folks born after the passage of civil rights laws inherit the legacy of that long history into which their forbears were born; after all, the accumulated advantages that developed in a system of racism are not buried in a hole with the passage of each generation. They continue into the present. Inertia is not just a property of the physical universe. In other words, there is enough commonality about the white experience to allow us to make some general statements about whiteness and never be too far from the mark.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“For those of us called white, whiteness simply is. Whiteness becomes, for us, the unspoken, uninterrogated norm, taken for granted, much as water can be taken for granted by a fish.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“Tradition is, after all, what we make it. The definition of the term is simply this: “a story, belief, custom, or proverb handed down from generation to generation.” There is nothing about the word that suggests tradition must be oppressive, or that it must necessarily serve to uphold the status quo. It is simply the narrative we tell ourselves, and as such, could just as easily involve resistance to oppression or injustice, as the perpetuation of the same. But if we aren’t clear in articulating the alternative tradition, we can hardly be surprised when persons don’t choose the direction in which it points, having never been appraised of its existence.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

“some of us are just too damned stupid to save.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“I have no idea when (or if) racism will be eradicated. I have no idea whether anything I say, do, or write will make the least bit of difference in the world. But I say it, do it, and write it anyway, because as uncertain as the outcome of our resistance may be, the outcome of our silence and inaction is anything but.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“We live not only in a racialized society, but also in a class system, a patriarchal system, and one of straight supremacy, able-bodied supremacy, and Christian hegemony. These”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“You can't organize people if you don't love them. And however hard it can be to love the racists you come in contact with, doing so is the first obligation of a white antiracist.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.” —JAMES BALDWIN,”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“colorblindness doesn’t solve the problem of racism. First, it doesn’t work. Kids see color, and research suggests they begin to draw conclusions about color-based differences early on. As early as preschool, children have begun to pick up cues about race and gender from popular culture, from parents and from peers, such that they begin to form hierarchies on the basis of those identities.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“The other problem with the way parents, and especially white ones, deal with race, is that they don’t deal with it at all when it comes to their children. They largely ignore it. Over the years, hundreds of white parents have proudly proclaimed to me that they rarely ever discuss racism with their children. “I want my kids to be able to hold on to their innocence,” some say. Others insist that “children don’t see color until we make them see it,” as justification for their silence about race. “We’re raising our kids to be colorblind,” still others maintain, as if such a parenting plan were the ultimate antiracist technique, and as if avoiding the topic of racism could instill such colorblindness in the first place.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“Most racists are less vicious than Nazis, and at the same time, they’re considerably harder to deal with. It is precisely the way that gardenvariety racists don’t think of themselves as such that makes it tougher to address them, especially because, despite their lack of self-awareness when it comes to their biases, their willingness to deploy the same is legion.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“This formal system of racial preference was codified from the 1600s until at least the mid-to-late ’60s, when the nation passed civil rights legislation, at least theoretically establishing equality in employment, voting, and housing opportunity.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“While some might insist that whites have a wide range of experiences, and so it isn’t fair to make generalizations about whites as a group, this is a dodge, and not a particularly artful one. Of course we’re all different, sort of like snowflakes. None of us have led exactly the same life. But irrespective of one’s particular history, all whites born before, say, 1964 were placed above all persons of color when it came to the economic, social, and political hierarchies that were to form in the United States, without exception.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“Though I hadn’t seen the trouble with the statement at sixteen when I had read Black Like Me during the summer before my junior year, now as an adult, and as someone who had been thinking about racism and white privilege for several years, it left me cold. There were two obvious problems with Griffin’s formulation: first, whites could have learned the truth by listening to real black people—not just white guys pretending to be black until the drugs wore off; and second, we could learn the truth by looking clearly at our own experiences as whites.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“In high school, whites are sometimes asked to think about race, but rarely about whiteness.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“What those inheritances meant, and still mean, is the subject of this inquiry, especially the last of these: What does it mean to be white in a nation created for the benefit of people like you? We don’t often ask this question, mostly because we don’t have to.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“Once born, I inherited my family and all that came with it. I also inherited my nation and all that came with that; and I inherited my “race” and all that came with that too. In all three cases, the inheritance was far from inconsequential. Indeed, all three inheritances were connected, intertwined in ways that are all too clear today.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me

“When we first draw breath outside the womb, we inhale tiny particles of all that came before, both literally and figuratively. We are never merely individuals; we are never alone; we are always in the company of others, of the past, of history.”
― Tim Wise, White Like Me